March 8 Sermon: Noah Found Favor
This week we come to the beginning of the story of Noah and the flood. As we look at Genesis 6:1-8 consider these questions:
1. How does the mixing of the godly line of Seth with the ungodly line of Cain in Genesis 6 reflect the broader theme of increasing unrighteousness in the world?
2. In the context of Genesis 6, what does God's response to the wickedness on Earth, such as the impending flood, reveal about His character and righteousness?
3. How does the story of Noah finding favor and being a child of the promise in Genesis 6 tie into the broader theme of God's redemptive plan and the importance of faith in the Christian life?
Transcript:
We live in a world where we look around us and we are often aghast at what it has become. If you are like me you probably hear yourself saying words like nowadays or even kids these days and you realize you sound like your grandparents or parents. This likely causes think back to what things were like when you were younger and you realize that, yes, things were bad back then too but our knowledge of this kind of stuff was limited. You didn’t have the 24 hour news cycle in the same way we have it now. We didn’t have access to trends in other parts of the world until they came to us in a newspaper the next day or in a magazine at the beginning of the next week or month. The speed of information has clearly increased. This has wonderful benefits. I remember watching the deacons at my home church growing up copy the cassette tapes of the service on a giant tape copying machine and being fascinated that those people would have a cassette of the service available to them that afternoon. As cassettes faded away I even once built my own multi-CD duplicator with old computer parts to get compact discs to church members but who would have imagined that with a minimal investment in equipment you can now stream your church service like we are today to YouTube immediately. That is amazing and wonderful. The speed of information can so easily and wonderfully be used to spread the gospel and bring glory to God but at the same time unrighteousness and stuff that grieves the heart of God is put out there for consumption at an alarming rate.
While this is not the same thing that was happening as we arrive in Genesis 6 I think we can feel the tension right along with the text, right? We understand a world that seems to be continuing its descent into sinfulness. I think we read the state of the world before the flood and we get it. We feel the tension that is in this passage.
We’ve seen this before in our journey to Genesis 6 though. We saw our first parents plunge us and all of creation into sin. We were right there watching as Cain refused to listen to God’s command to master sin and instead of choosing life he murdered his own brother. We followed Cain as he west east of Eden and had children and we saw that evil was increasing in the world and we met Lamech who was 7 generations after Cain and we saw that his evil and sinfulness was multiplied multiply beyond what we had seen in Cain. This is what we feel as we journey through Genesis but as I’ve pointed out we are given hope. We see that God has not abandoned humanity. He made a promise that the seed of the woman would come and crush the head of the serpent and so last week we saw the godly line of Seth. It was his family that would fulfill the promise. It was his family that would be godly and from them would come the messiah. The one who would stomp on the head of the serpent. Genesis 5 and the godly line of Seth gives us hope. We are meant to feel like maybe righteousness will prevail. Maybe the head crusher is already here. Maybe victory will be won over the ungodly line but now we come to chapter 6 and we are meant to feel disappointed in what we find here. We are meant to see that something needs to be done because unrighteousness in this world we are reading about is running rampant. Something needs to be done.
This is where we have landed today in our journey through Genesis and, as always, I want to map out for you where we are headed today. We are going to see three specific points as we move through these 8 verses this morning.
First, we will see that the ungodly line of Cain has been mixed in with the godly line of Seth. Before chapter 6 we would have looked at the family lines of these two men as separate. They seem to be two different stories. In fact, you might wonder why we are even hearing about the line of Cain at all because haven’t I been saying the book of Genesis is showing us this line to the Messiah. Cain isn’t in the line to Jesus. Why did Moses bother to include all this info about Cain’s line if we’re only worried about getting to the family of Jesus? Well, this is why.
Secondly, we see that the spread of wickedness grieved God. It hurt him. It is contrary to his holy nature and he can’t just turn a blind eye to it. He comes in judgment and his judgment is not out of nowhere or random. It is justified.
Lastly, we will see that Noah found favor. Noah was a righteous man in his generation but he was also blessed to have the favor of God. Noah received grace and will not be rescued because of his own works but because of the amazing mercy and grace of almighty God. Noah is for us, a picture of faith.
We land right away in a rather contentious part of scripture. There has speculation about what the first two verses here mean. Some suggest that this is fallen angels interbreeding with humans. Some suggest that the song of God’s are nobility and bad things happened when the nobility intermixed with the common folk. I don’t believe that mixes with the text and I try to always come to the text and look to answer questions like these with what makes the most sense and comes out of the text for us. Maybe you have heard of the problem solving principle called Occam’s Razor. It comes from a Englishman from the 1200’s. The idea is that we shouldn’t over-complicate things and make them more difficult than they need to be. In other words, the simplest solution is the easiest solution. But we as humans often like over complicating things. Sometimes we just like to make things complicated when the basic answer is not only correct and what we need.
We have to remember, this passage isn’t on an island. Moses made sure we had some background to this story before we got here. Like I recalled earlier. Chapter 4 tells us of the ungodly line of Cain. Chapter 5 tells us the godly line of Seth. So when the story shifts to tell us about increasing ungodliness the context of the passage lets us know who the daughters of men were and who the sons of God were. The daughters of men were from the ungoldy line of Cain and the sons of God were from the godly line of the promise that came from Seth. The children of the promise were being mixed in with the children of the family that in their unrighteousness had rejected the promise of God.
The line to the Messiah was in jeopardy because they were more concerned with beauty than godliness. They didn’t take a wife from the godly line but anyone they chose. We see that God doesn’t like what is happening. This isn’t just because his plans are getting mixed up. We are going to see that this is because there was rampant unrighteousness on the earth. It is no longer just the line of Cain that is becoming more wicked. Everything is getting mixed up and the wickedness is running rampant.
Before, we move on to our second point there is something else we need to look at here. People always want to know what who the Nephilim were. I’ve seen suggestions of a mix of angels and people and even some suggesting that they were aliens. Again, the text of the passage doesn’t tell us specifics and we get no indication of angels and humans producing offspring anywhere else in scripture and we definitely don’t get an indication that there are aliens beaming down giants either. Again, a simple explanation is the best. They were mighty men. They were probably known for their power. Maybe they were larger than average like someone like Goliath. We don’t know but fanciful guessing doesn’t get us anywhere and just confuses us on what the point of the passage is. The world is increasing in sinfulness and we are meant to see that all of this is going to fall. Even the people of renown will be no more after the judgment of almighty God.
And so we’ve seen how the world is hurdling toward unrighteousness and we see that God is going to do something about it. We jump back in the text for a moment as we see that God is going to do something about this. He says that his Spirit will not abide in man forever. He is merely flesh and so their days shall be 120 years. While after the flood we find people living a much shorter life there are still those who live beyond 120 years. What God is saying here is not that he’s going to limit the lifespan of people to 120 years or 43,800 days or even a few more with leap years thrown in. This is an indication that judgment is going to come in 120 years. Something is coming that will put an end to the evil that he sees in the world.
And what we see going forward is how much unrighteousness bothers God.
What we see is that it grieves him. As we come to verse five, we see that the wickedness of man was great in the earth. What we are meant to feel here is that it was bad with the line of Cain but now the mixing of Cain’s line has even caused the godly line to be polluted. This is not just that there is a whole bunch of bad out there in little patches here and there. Evil has permeated everything.
It says that the LORD saw that wickedness was great. Genesis isn’t implying that God was absent and came and looked and was surprised that suddenly his creation has become polluted by sin and now he has to do something. This language of God is seeing is putting it in a way that we can understand. We are meant to understand in such a way that we think about when we have seen something that grieves us. We get this story in such a way that we feel the depth and gravity of what is going on. We are to understand that this is worse than bad. This so bad that God even regrets that he created because every intention of the thoughts of humanity is evil. We see here just how deep human depravity goes and God being completely righteous and just his anger is justified. These creatures that he made made from the dirt are standing in defiance of his holiness. Their rebellion deserves the judgment of God.
We know the story of the flood very well but I think we often struggle with it. It seems so extreme. Why such an extreme punishment? We need to remember that God is just in his judgment. He is the creator. He is the one who is holy. His anger toward sin is always justified. We think of sin as a slip up here and there but sin is rebellion against God and the sin on the earth had grown and polluted the whole earth. Something had to be done and here we see the flood as the punishment for that sin.
We struggle with the wrath of God. We really do. So much so that we rarely here about it very much any more but it is a reality that we are forced to deal with but the good news for us. Is that the wrath of God for our sin as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ has been poured out on someone else. We deserve death but God in his mercy payed that price for our sin when God the Son was put under the flood of his wrath at the cross. The punishment for sin was paid there by God himself. That is the good news of Christianity. Yes, God is holy and we have violated that holiness and deserve his wrath but for us the flood of his wrath was paid for by the death of Jesus Christ in our place. When we realize we deserve to be punished for our sin and rebellion we are to remember that if we are in Christ we do not received the flood of his wrath because he has already endured it. Instead, we are flooded with his mercy and we are called to turn from our sin in repentance and faith.
And we see this here in this passage with the very last verse where we see our final point for today. Noah found favor.
We read this and our assumption is that well the whole of humanity is evil but Noah was good enough to save. He had earned his passage on the boat. While it is true that Noah was a righteous man in an unrighteous age he would not have been perfect and sinless. There is something from the last chapter that we need to remember and understand. This is not the first time we have heard about this Noah guy. At the end of chapter five we learn that Noah is a child of the promise in the godly line of Seth.
While Noah was righteous in his day he was also a child of the promise. God’s grace and favor had come to rest upon him because he was the one through whom God would continue the line to the messiah who would crush the head of the serpent. God can’t just wipe out all of humanity. He has made a promise. He has spoken by his word and he cannot lie. Also, the one who would be spared in from the flood could not just be a random righteous person. It had to be the one on whom the promise rested.
And this is who Noah is. He has found favor in the eyes of God. Usually when we think of the favor of God we think that if God is going to show us favor we are going to have success and be wealthy. In fact, in our day an entire false teaching has been built around that idea. It teaches that God wants you to be rich and prosperous, you just have to have enough faith.
This is not what we find in scripture. Instead, what we find is that the favor that God bestows on us is his saving grace. It is a favor that is eternal. It is a favor that rests on the gift of God given through faith.
This is what we see when we read what Hebrews 11 has to say about Noah.
He received a righteousness that comes not by works but by faith. In a world that would have mocked his faith he believed God. Imagine being told to build an ark and waiting 100 plus years for the flood to come. God came to Noah the child of the promise in his generation and offered him grace through salvation in the ark. Noah believed God and he was given the gift of righteousness. He trusted not in himself but in the word and command of God. He trusted in the promise and he was rescued from the wrath of God in the ark. He and his family.
This is a short passage with some interesting nuances to it but it has a very important message. There is definite application for us here in 2020.
The first is that we need to have an understanding of how sin grieves the heart of God. Sin is rebellion against God. In an age where we seem less and less concerned about righteousness this doesn’t just mean we should look at the sin out there and think that it grieves God. We should be looking at the sin in here and understanding the gravity of our rebellion against God. If it grieves the heart of God our sin should also grieve our hearts. We should be hearing the word and letting the Holy Spirit work in our hearts to convict us of our sin and unbelief. That we might grow in faith and leave our sin behind.
To do this we need our second point of application that comes out of this part of Genesis so much. Remember the promise. Yes, our sin grieves God but he does something about it. As soon as our first parents fell into sin he gave a promise that the head of the serpent would be crushed. This promise is what is to be in front of us as we live the Christian life. It is the gospel and we never outgrow it. It is the truth that God kept his promise. He delivered the promised one and he died for our sin. He is the one who took on the flood of God’s wrath to rescue us from our sin and unbelief. This is the promise of God and when we feel the weight of our sin we can get up and walk in faith like Noah did trusting that the method of our rescue is going to save us.
And we have a sign of that promise before us today. God made a covenant with his people. These were the signs of the promise that he would save us and the sign of the covenant that we as a people have with God is the covenant the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. Today we are blessed to a real tactile reminder that God will not pour out his wrath on us for our sin, even though we deserve it. Instead, as surely as this bread and juice will touch your lips today, so surely did Jesus die to rescue you from the wrath of God.
Rest in this truth and let it give you peace. As you take the elements today remember the promise and how God has ordained it all for you to be saved by grace through faith that you might bring honor, glory, and praise to his holy name.
